The Elementary OS team has released their latest offering, Luna, which has been in development for a while now. Based on Ubuntu, this Linux distribution aims to develop its own minimalist applications, but it goes beyond that - it has its own desktop environment, window manager, human interface guidelines, APIs, and more. There's an article on their blog detailing the road to Luna.

They've managed to build quite some hype, so let's see if it lives up to it. Does anyone here use it?

I think it's less "rip off" and more "inspired". Not in the Jobsian sense of inspired, but actually aesthetically pleasing while different enough that you won't get confused which OS you're in unless you leave your glasses in the other room.

I'm actually excited to see this release; previous beta releases would run fine as a live CD and would usually install fine, but the install would then refuse to boot on my workstation. This was really confusing since the OS is based on Ubuntu and all versions from 11.04 through the current release work fine on here. Having it install and run nearly flawlessly made me very happy this weekend when I tried it out.

The only bugs I've found so far are minor. When installed with the option to encrypt the home folder, the passphrase/key script fails to keep the terminal window open. If you already have an open terminal it will stay open but will not run the script. You have to call the script by manually typing it into a terminal window, which is trivial but a bug nonetheless. This bug doesn't appear on stock Ubuntu, and I suspect it has to do with Luna's custom terminal app. Another minor bug has to do with the Luna theme not playing nice with older or non-standard GTK apps, an easy fix with a few tweaks. Again, trivial but annoying.

Overall I really love the balance of eye candy vs simplicity, and I think I might play around with GNUStep some to give this even more of a "Mac feel". Haters can hate, but everyone has an opinion and mine is mostly positive.